By Coco-Lily
A wise Me once asked: why do you own a balaclava?
I use it as a beanie, I told her.
A hotter, shinier Me asked: why do you own a balaclava?
I like dressing up, I said.
Another Me, tooth gems flashing, asked: why do you own a balaclava?
I want to look like Ashley Benson from Spring Breakers.
A fourth Me descended a staircase in Chanel, glock in hand, smiling with citrus knowing.
I opened my eyes and touched my gem-less tooth and Chanel-less neck. I pictured security cameras. I wondered if eBay sold firearms. I wondered if I had already searched that before.
The truth is I don’t know why I own a balaclava. Two, actually. Black and pink. I own a lot of things like that. A pink machete. Angel wings. A unicorn that blinks. Objects that feel pre-loaded with intention. I used to collect sticks. Then stickers. Then business cards. I like the logic of owning two balaclavas. It’s like owning hair ties without hair.
Maybe I have hair.
Maybe I’ve been hiding it.
Shall we find out?
*
It’s everyday again. It’s always almost Wednesday or Sunday.
Cut the shit, I think.
Cut the shit with this shit.
This performative college life. This careful, curated exhaustion.
All I want is Buffalo grass and Ruby rocks and ‘grass’ and something ‘on the rocks’ while I cross my legs on top of a mountain and twirl my 25-carat ring in the white winter sun.
I think about Robert De Niro. The mafia face.
Could I mafia-ise my own face?
I try it.
It doesn’t work.
My face refuses threat.
My face wants to be liked.
I am five-foot-one and delicate and white. I am the small wife of the mafia. I am the dainty daughter of the mafia. I am the mafia’s baby and virgin. Without a gun, I am a TikTok prank. A performance artist, at best. Definitely a harmless inconvenience. With a gun, I am still those things, but now there’s doubt. Your knees bend and your hands rise and you call me Darling because I told you to. You hear my voice and try to place my age. Seventeen. Eighteen. Impossible, you think. A girl like this? I clean the register while you process me. I make myself a ham and avocado footlong. I’ve spent more on footlongs than the cash in these four fanny packs.
You look at the boy on the floor with hands behind his head and realise something is wrong.
Why isn’t he shaking? Shouldn’t he be scared? Terrified, even? Throwing up? Bargaining, at least? Shouldn’t he understand that this is content? That this is narrative? That this is escalation and climax?
You point the gun at him.
“Say please,” you tell him.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing,” you say.
You want to throw up. He doesn’t care enough. The word murderer enters the room and sits down quietly.
There’s a Google speaker near a mop. Of course there is.
Google, search ‘is this how Anna Delvey felt when the fantasy became administrative?’
Google, search ‘is it okay to murder someone under certain circumstances?’
Google, play reassuring ambient soundscapes for when you’re stuck in a rut.
The speaker is small and matte. It looks like it belongs in a hotel lobby where the fruit water has cucumber slices floating like small, disciplined boats.
Google, search ‘is robbing a sandwich shop entrepreneurial?’
Google, search ‘how to fast-track being taken seriously?’
Google, search ‘at what point does cheating become strategy?’
You look at the boy again. He’s checking his nails like robberies happen as frequently as stock deliveries. This doesn’t feel like a Harmony Korine movie. You feel like someone who bought the costume before the life.
“Can I ask you a question?”
You look at the boy on his knees.
“Uh…depends,” you say.
“Why are you so fucking stupid?”
You frown, swallow, crack your neck, roll your wrists, scratch your arm. You pick up the gun and point it at his head again.
“What?”
“I said why are you such a fucking idiot?” He snickers.
Where is your Harley Quinn personality when you need her? You think. Comebacks blow around like lottery balls in your head.
“And what the fuck is ‘Darling’? So fucking weird, man.”
You just blink a lot because what else can you do?
He shakes his head. “Bitches be thinking they’re always in a fucking movie, bro.”
Were you bro?
“Kinda rate you going this hard though. It’s kinda funny. Like going to jail for god knows how long, and for like $500 bucks. That’s pretty shit lol.”
You want to cut ‘lol’ out of his throat and incinerate it. You realise you are a Spring Breakers girl realising she isn’t in Spring Breakers. You are the god-complex girl who thought she was cute enough to pull off a robbery but died from two gun wounds to each of her pony eyes.
Her eyes go first! I imagine the fat cop barking into his radio from the parking lot.
They are the root of the problem! The cause of Her evil! Oh, what will She do without her eyes! Nothing! She’ll be dead! Ha! But She was dead already, wasn’t she? But what would be worse – or perhaps, constructive – would be to shoot both eyes and NOT kill her! Forced to live without beauty, that’s right! The possibilities of this, gentlemen! She could go to Mars without her beauty tainting her. She might even get good at math! She might finally write that novel about twenty-two mice living in a dollhouse. So exciting, isn’t it? We could give her a new life! She might have to learn braille, but that would be good for her!
You would be your own experiment as much as you would be theirs. You would be the crazy robbery bitch in the Subway boys Discord chat. Hot, his friends would say. So cool, they’d say. What a narcissistic psychopath, they’d say. They say all this because what else do boys say?
One of them will post the story on Reddit and you will be immortalised as failing to be dangerous. You will have proved the patriarchy right. You will be a feminist laughingstock. This can’t go on, you think. You tried but it isn’t working. Time to go home and kick off your boots. Wash your face so you don’t break out from the ski mask. Watch some gardening videos. Maybe make a TikTok storytime about your attempted robbery and don’t post it but imagine that if you did it would get two million likes.
You set the gun on the counter and look at the boy who is now picking his knee.
“Hey, so, uh…” You swallow.
He looks up like what now, bitch?
“You’re…uh, kinda right. I’m thinking…this isn’t really, uh…worth it? I think…I think I fucked up…”.
You spot your uneaten sub.
“Like, could I just pay for this sub and go? I’m serious. Please…Like, I’m so sorry about this shit…”
He grins.
“Ohhhh shit,” he laughs, nodding, tapping the floor with his hand.
“She’s pussying outtttt fellas! Ha! Too scary for ya? Lol.” He shrugs. “Just give me a $20 and I won’t say shit, honest.”
You search his face for any signs of SIKE. “Wait, like…actually?”
He shrugs. “Like, yeah, whatever. Sure.”
“For real? Can I just…I think…I think I have a $50?”
You dish inside your pocket and find the $50 some Hinge date gave you to buy yourself a ‘nice steak’ because you told him all you’ve been eating are Subway footlongs for the past three months.
The boy sighs. “Yeah, yeah, whatever man.”
The Hinge man would be very disappointed in you, now. Luckily, he turned out to be married and a personal trainer, so you don’t feel guilty about spending his money on the wrong thing. Or is it the right thing? What is the right thing? Succumb to defeat? Keep going and fail even harder? No. You have lit the flame of defeat already. There is no return. You have failed and now you have to clean up the crumbs and sanitise the situation. You wonder what Harmony Korine would write for the next scene. You don’t want to know what Larry Clark would write for the next scene. You would die to know how God would write this scene.
You have been in the Subway store for twenty-one minutes now, and the tomatoes are starting to look scary. Nausea and neck pain blind you for a second, then you reach for the knife. You press the knife down on the sub, and the bread gives a papery crackle. You pull the halves apart and roll each one in paper while the boy watches. You shake crumbs off the gun and pocket it in the back of your baggy sweatpants. You place the $50 on the counter and place the half sandwich on the note like a paperweight. You try to hold in tears like holding in pee with a UTI. Which you can’t. Your eyes go full wet season and tears are falling, absorbing into your balaclava, before you’re out the door. And then you are. You hear the credits rolling louder than your own thoughts.
Before you run three blocks and order an Uber, you look inside the Subway for the last time and just glimpse the boy throwing the half sandwich in the bin.
